Greenhouse gas accounting tool: Webinar

On Friday 11 September Local Partnerships and the LGA are hosting a joint webinar to introduce the new greenhouse gas accounting tool available for local authorities to use, for free. The webinar will provide further explanation of why the tool has been developed and how it will assist local authorities calculate their baseline emissions.

The session will be chaired by Councillor Andrew Cooper, Joint Leader of the Green/Valley Independent Group. He will be joined by Jo Wall and Rachel-Toresen-Owuor from Local Partnerships who will provide more detail on the tool and Simran Bachra from CDP (previously the Carbon Disclosure Project) who will discuss the importance of carbon disclosure. Also joining the webinar to provide practical insights from her own experience using the accounting tool is Ariane Crampton, Head of Carbon Reduction at Wiltshire Council.

The greenhouse gas accounting tool is a free resource available for councils seeking to calculate their own carbon baseline. It has been developed by Local Partnerships, working with the LGA, to provide a straightforward and reliable approach for all councils, standardising how local government measures and reports carbon emissions as well as enabling consistent sector-wide benchmarking and disclosure.

The tool has been designed specifically to cover local authorities’ own activities and operations to help them understand their most significant sources of emissions, which can then be used to prioritise actions to reduce carbon emissions. It can be used to record Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions plus basic Scope 3 emissions. It automatically links the data inputted with the relevant UK Government Conversion Factors, taking away some of the burden of the calculations.

As well as providing councils with the means to measure and report their own greenhouse gas emissions, it provides the opportunity to benchmark their emissions against other councils, should they want to understand how their performance compares with their peers. Local Partnerships will be collecting completed baselines from councils for the benchmarking exercise. More information can be found here.

Councils can download and complete the tool now. It includes basic instructions and comes with a set of FAQs. For a more in-depth explanation and a live demonstration of how to complete the tool please join our webinar on Friday 11 September at 10am. To register please click here.